Testimonials and Case Studies

Ambassador from Bedfordshire area

"The work you do, and we get to see when we go into schools is genuinely inspiring and enthusing children about STEM opportunities, from the youngest to the oldest, and encouraging teachers too. It’s opening eyes to a wider world, which is a terrific thing to achieve, irrespective of ultimately chosen careers".

Ryan Austin - Suffolk One Student

"Thank you to everyone for helping out with my work experience. Had a great time this week learning about all the different jobs that's go on and how the business runs altogether. It's really helped me gain an understanding of how engineering as a whole works and what I may be in for in the future. Also thank you to Russ and Andrew and everyone else that organised it all and allowed me to spend the week at Muntons"

Rob Farman - STEM Ambassador

. I am convinced one of the top priorities for STEM Ambassadors has to be “To educate the educators about engineering.”. After I delivered some CPD on engineering to10 STEM teachers at a secondary school and followed-up with information on apprenticeships, a young STEM teacher wrote to me saying:

“Many thanks for coming in and talking to us last week. It was very interesting to hear about your career and also to find out more about how to get into engineering, something which I had previously no knowledge of.

That confirmed what I suspected after I presented to 230 children age 4-11 years old on the Apollo moon landings and then their Year 6 on engineering. The teachers said to me afterwards that they did not realised how much goes on in engineering and how complex it is. We need to explain to teachers that, that employers seek, underpinned by motivation and commitment: personal skills; hand & eye coordination skills and, as “a first filter” academic skills. We need to explain engineering is well-paid and the apprenticeship route. Too many are going to university and ending-up in non-graduate jobs.

Soundbites. Picking up the primary school:

“After I outlined, with pictures, the Apollo moon landings to 230 children age 4-11 years old, one child tapped me on the arm as I was sitting down and said “Well done.”; I was literally touched, it made it all worthwhile.”

“After I asked the Year 6 girls “Who is going to be the next girl to win a Nobel Prize for science, after Professor Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, still the only British woman to have won one?”, a girl shot up her arm like Apollo 11 blasting from Cape Canaveral and said emphatically “I am.”.

“Later, when I spoke about seeing a 25 metres swimming pool on the 7th floor of an office building at Canary Wharf, that same girl shot up her arm again and asked “What about the weight of water?” “An excellent question.”, I said, “You are thinking like an engineer.”.”

At sixth form college a girl of 13 asked me:

““Is it true that only boys can become engineers?.”, to which I replied “Professor Dame Anne Dowling is the President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, our most prestigious engineering body.”

“Thank you so much for helping to make the Farlingaye Careers Conference 2016 so successful.

1200 students, 65 teachers and an uncountable number of cups of tea were involved. So together we managed to share our message of raising aspirations and thinking about the future to over half the school.”

David West-STEM Ambassador attended Year 9 PSCHE at Thurston Community College

“I thought the format of the PSCHE day was well thought out and I really enjoyed the experience – very attentive students.”

Amanda Kerr-Muslow - STEM Ambassador

I was told “The children returned to school as heroes”, For my “Extreme Weather” activity, I knew one of the parents via one of the student’s siblings – she phoned me that night to say “[name redacted] hasn’t stopped talking about your visit, from the moment I picked her up from school to the point I put her to bed!” For “Exploring our Weather” we split the class into two groups, with me taking half for looking at clouds and the teacher with the others exploring wind (after a little training by email, and the groups were within sight/shout of each other) the teacher said, “I told them, deadpan, that I was going to hand out some professional atmospheric tracers, and they had to be careful with them. When I handed out the bottles of bubbles, they were thrilled. The wind was so light, the anemometers wouldn’t work, so I was very glad you’d popped the ‘tracers’ in too.” Of course, the best feedback is the big smiles on the students’ faces, or being pointed out excitedly in the supermarket to parents, who are dragged over to meet me, but I rather appreciated being invited back for the following year before I’d even left the building!